Intrusion detection systems can be applied at many levels in an enterprise environment: to protect host systems from exploits of known vulnerabilities, to protect from attacks coming in from the network (from outside the firewall or from within), to protect against security policy violations within a system or enterprise, and even to protect some applications. Currently, IDS comes in two types:
1) “Network-based” IDS, and
2) “Host-based” IDS.
Network-based IDS's function inside a monitored network and monitor network packets searching for patterns of activity indicative of an attack on the network or probing/attacking of systems from outside the firewall. Examples of such attacks include: “Ping of Death”, SYN flooding, “winnuke”—an attack on Windows NT systems and various denial-of-service attacks. This type of IDS can run on local host systems that have (a lot of) bandwidth to spare, or (conveniently for the IDS vendors) they can be packaged and sold as a dedicated systems that monitor network activity “in the background” without adding overhead to the production system.
Properties of network-based intrusion detection are:                Observes network packets in a dedicated IDS system attached to LAN        Collect router and gateway data        Protects against a variety of network attacks        Lacks host contextual information.        Is easier to implement than host-based IDS        Plays to over-hyped “outsider” attacks.        
Host-based IDS on the other hand reside and execute on the system being protected. Although host-based IDS incurs some overhead penalty on protection systems, the host-based IDS can provide significantly better protection because the host-based IDS can monitor low level system activity and thereby detect misuse/intrusions activities that are impossible to detect from the network. Host-based IDS is also capable of detecting misuse/intrusions by users directly logged on to the system who are not even using the network. In addition, all network-based misuse/attacks can also be detected by a host-based IDS.
System misuse (attacks) that can be detected by the host-based IDS but which are impossible to detect from the network are those that exploit system vulnerabilities to obtain elevated privilege: buffer overflow attacks, symlink exploits, setgid root, modifying or moving system binary files, etc.
By monitoring low-level system activity, less knowledge is required about the wide variety of attack scenarios employed by hackers. This is because many attack scenarios exploit the same basic system vulnerabilities. Low-level activity monitoring requires only that activity patterns exploiting these few vulnerabilities be detected, instead of requiring activity checks against a vast library of “attack pattern scenarios” that must be updated whenever a new scenario discovered.
A number of technologies have emerged as potential solutions to the various security problems faced by companies. Firewalls, encryption, and security auditing tools are useful in the world of security. A firewall is a system that is placed between two networks that controls what traffic is allowed between those networks. A firewall is usually placed between the Internet and the internal intranet. It can be viewed as a useful point of policy enforcement through which you can decide what network traffic is and is not permitted to and from the organization. When deployed correctly (itself a difficult task in a complex business environment), a firewall is an efficient tool to prevent attacks on the critical systems and data. However, a firewall connected to the Internet cannot protect the user against an attack against the systems launched from inside the organization. Often the firewall cannot stop an attacker inside the organization from attacking systems on the Internet.
A further complication in deploying a firewall is that it is difficult to establish clearly where the boundary exists between inside and outside. At one time it was obvious that the Internet was outside and the intranet was inside. However, more and more corporations are joining their intranets in multiple-partner arrangements, often termed extranets. A firewall becomes difficult to deploy in an extranet environment; if inside and outside have been joined together, where can you draw the line and place the firewall? In such an environment, some form of continuous security monitoring tool is needed to ensure that critical systems are not being abused and valuable data is not being pilfered by the so-called partners.
Encryption is a mathematical technique that prevents the unauthorized reading and modification of data. It does this in such a way that the intended recipients of the data can read it but no intermediate recipient can read or alter the data. It also allows authentication of the sender of a message—is the claimed sender really the person who sent the message? In any well-designed cryptographic system, the heart of the security is the key which is used to encrypt the message. Knowing the key allows you to decrypt any message, alter it, and retransmit it to the sender. Even if the inner workings of the encryption software are known completely, without knowing the key you cannot read or alter messages.
The problem with relying on encryption lies in the old adage a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In this case, the weakest link is not the encryption technology but the systems on which the key is stored. After all, how can you be sure the program you are using to encrypt the data has not saved the key to a temporary file on the disk, from which an attacker can later retrieve it? If attackers gain access to the key, not only can they decrypt the data, they can impersonate you and send messages claiming to be signed only by you.
Encryption does not protect the data while it is in the clear (not encrypted) as you process it (for example, preparing a document for printing). Moreover, encryption cannot protect the systems against denial of service attacks. So despite the advantages in the space of privacy and authentication that encryption brings, it is still only part of an overall security solution. A security auditing tool probes the systems and networks for potential vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit, and generates a report identifying holes and recommending fixes. Of course, the assumption is that once you find the holes, you will quickly patch them before they are exploited. If used in this fashion, and run regularly, a security auditing tool can be a very valuable weapon against attackers.
But how regularly should you run the tool? Attacks can occur at any point in the day; an attacker can penetrate the systems, cover up his or her tracks, and install a variety of backdoors all within a matter of minutes. Running the tools every hour gives attackers a very large window of opportunity to exploit the systems, steal the data, and cover their tracks before you ever detect them. It is obvious that if some form of continuously running security audit tool were available, life would be much simpler and the systems more secure. This brings us to the need for an Intrusion Detection System.
The amount of information that flows through a typical corporate intranet and the level of activity on most corporate servers make it impossible for any one person to continually monitor them by hand. Traditional network management and system monitoring tools do not address the issue of helping to ensure that systems are not misused and abused. Nor can they help detect theft of a company's critical data from important servers. The potential impact of computer-based crime is significant to most corporations: their entire intellectual property often resides on server machines. A tool that could detect security-related threats and attacks as they occur would significantly ease the burden that most network administrators face.
The current market perception is that network-based intrusion detection systems are the more important, probably because of the current media and market focus on hackers breaking into systems from the Internet (from outside the firewall). More importantly, this perception is being sustained by current IDS vendors because Network-based IDS is easier to do and easier to package.
However, statistics provided by the FBI have shown that the major portion of computer security break-ins are done by insiders and from inside the Intranet firewalls: the greater threat is the insider attack. In short, most threats come from within the enterprise and firewalls cannot prevent attacks from within. Some statistics are worth noting:                30% of all Internet break-ins occurred despite the presence of a firewall. Source: Fortune Magazine, February 1997.        32% of the losses were due to internal hackers. Source: 1996 Information Week/Ernst & Young Information Security Survey.        Total 1996 estimated damage in dollars from security break-ins: $10 billion. Source: FBI.        78% of the companies surveyed reported losing money through security breaches. Source: FBI and the Computer Security Institute        Reasons given for not reporting a known break-in:                    75% wanted to avoid negative publicity.            72% felt that a competitor would use this info against them.            53% were unaware that they could report such a crime.            60% decided that a civil remedy was better.                        Source: 1996 Computer Security Institute/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey.        
Firewalls cannot detect or prevent attacks on enterprise systems from within the Intranet. The challenge is to know when systems have been compromised from within. Many inside attacks can not be prevented, but can be detected as abnormal system activity by host-based intrusion detection.
When a security system has failed, it is important to be notified of that fact as soon as possible. A crude form of intrusion detection could be the daily or weekly audit-log review, searching for inappropriate system activity. The difficulties with this approach are:
1) Even with an effective, disciplined daily review the successful hacker could have up to 24 hours of free reign inside the systems before being detected, and any damage that might have been done might not be discovered for a long time thereafter.
2) No human review process can be as effective and disciplined as necessary in order to provide even this poor level of protection.
3) Audit logs are very large and a person may not detect patterns of misuse spanning many entries.
4) Reviewing audit logs is the kind of work a machine should do.
Misuse of a system is a difficult term to define, but may be loosely described as any action that attempts to undermine the data protection, access control or user authentication mechanisms on a system. An attacker may be an outsider attempting to gain access to certain systems, but more often than not is an insider using specialized knowledge to subvert security controls on a system.
Financial institutions are very sensitive to the damage a single rogue individual in a point of trust can do. A similar threat exists in the electronic sphere. Every day billions of dollars are transferred around the world over computer networks. Increased connectivity and the use of the Internet have increased the exposure to subversion faced by financial institutions. As more and more banks offer bank-at-home facilities via the Web, the risk of a customer's financial information being intercepted grows dramatically.
When most people think of theft, they initially think of financial theft. However, a far more damaging form is theft of intellectual property. Intellectual property refers to what it is that only you know that allows you to outsmart the competitors. The intellectual property could be the design of a new engine, the code to the latest product, or even the customer contact list. If this information got into the hands of the competitors, it would seriously damage the business. The threat to intellectual property is keenly felt by companies worldwide and any technology that can reduce the risk of information falling into the wrong hands is very valuable.
Information is of no use if it cannot be acted upon, and not having the computing resources available to process information renders it useless. Any company that offers its customers an online service is acutely aware of the potential losses that can result from even a minute of downtime. This is especially true in the case of web pages. Lack of availability of critical computing resources because of malicious actions is a serious threat faced by any company doing business on the Internet today: the loss of business (measured in dollars) can be significant. Harder to quantify, but more damaging in the long term, is the loss of consumer confidence in a business that suffered an online attack.
Another example of a loss of a critical computing resource is a corporate e-mail system crash. When the outage is caused intentionally by an attacker who is continually disrupting business, the financial cost to a company can be very high—lost sales or miscommunication with customers, for example.
There are real concerns about privacy, for example, in the medical, insurance and banking fields. If a computer system is broken into by an outside attacker, personally sensitive data may be obtained that could leave you liable to legal action because of a lack of due diligence on the part to protect sensitive data.
Most perpetrators often are not nefarious hackers who roam the Internet, but the very own employees, whom you trust with the critical data and systems. Disgruntled employees who have an intimate knowledge of the systems and network are far more likely to abuse their positions of trust. However, most effort has been expended in defending against the perceived threat from outside. As a result, most security solutions have focused on firewalls and web servers, completely ignoring the serious problem that comes from within. Industrial corporate espionage is also a significant threat to companies, especially in foreign countries.
The following show the circumstances that leas to the vast bulk of security problems.
Misplaced Trust
When you access a company's web page, you are trusting that it really is the company's web page you are viewing and not some interloper pretending to be that company. When you download product data from it, you are trusting that it is accurate and correct. When you order their product, you are trusting that the order information is being kept confidential. When you receive e-mail, you trust that the person identified as the sender really did send you the e-mail. When you type the password into a program, you are entrusting that its designers did not include code to save the passwords so they can break into the system at a later date. In each of these examples, the trust can be misplaced.
Computer viruses are the single biggest cause of lost productivity in a business environment. The real cost of viruses is not the damage they cause, but the total cost of cleanup to ensure that the infection has not spread to other computers. Moreover, Java and ActiveX permit the downloading of executable code from the Internet without any assurances as to its real purpose. There are many examples of Web pages that contain ActiveX or Java applets that will steal a file from the hard drive.
As the saying goes, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” There is no point in investing in a complex security solution if there is a simple backdoor around it. For example, one router vendor recently had a problem whereby all of their boxes shipped with a default password that was easy to guess. Most administrators forgot to change the password. Despite investing many hours in correctly configuring the routers for secure operation, their security could be defeated in seconds by an attacker who knew the password.
As more business is done over the Internet, more trust is placed in critical infrastructure elements: the routers, hubs, and Web servers that move data around the net. They also include DNS name servers that allow users to access www.mycompany.com from their browsers. A DNS server is a computer that maps names such as www.company.com to an Internet address such as 10.2.3.4. By attacking these important infrastructure services, a hacker can bring the whole organization to its knees. Sometimes an attacker does not have to steal information. By simply making the systems unavailable for use the attacker can cause you losses in both financial terms and in credibility in the industry.
It may seem obvious, but if you misconfigure a critical piece of software or hardware, you can open your self up to many security problems. This is a particular problem in the area of firewalls, where configuration rules are complex—one missed rule can leave the whole internal network open to attack. Another example is a network where the system administrator has not taken the time to put some simple security measures in place.
Code that runs with privilege (as root on UNIX systems, or as Administrator on Windows NT systems) is particularly vulnerable because a simple bug can have major impact. Most security problems are found in code that runs with privilege that is poorly designed. Moreover, most code runs with more privilege than it needs to accomplish its task. Often a site will install its Web server to run as root, granting it far greater privilege than it needs to simply serve up Web pages and CGI scripts. A Web server running as root is a prime target for an attacker—exploiting CGI script vulnerability can gain the attacker full root privileges on the systems.
In summary, although host-based systems have numerous advantages as compared to network based systems, the difficulty is that prior art host-based systems require traditional signature matching against hundreds of templates. Up until now there have not been any effective host-based IDS systems. Thus, a need exists for an efficient host-based intrusion detection system.